Tag: bilingual

Each year, Renaissance releases the What Kids Are Reading report, and each year it grows by leaps and bounds.1 This year’s report looked at the reading habits of seven million students from more than 26,000 schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. These students read more than 255 million books last year, making it the largest...

A first-of-its kind study in U.S.-born children from Spanish-speaking families has found that minority language exposure does not threaten the acquisition of English by children in the U.S. and that there is no trade-off between English and Spanish. Rather, children reliably acquire English, and their total language knowledge is greater in that they also acquire Spanish. Results of the study,...

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $500,000 grant to support the efforts of the America’s Languages Working Group in building the Guide to Exemplary Programs and Practices in U.S. Language Education—a means of expanding equitable access to language education in the U.S. The American Councils for International Education, one of the constituent organizations of the Working Group,...

Last month, over 320 people (on Zoom and YouTube) took part in the 2021 LaunchPad, a Shark Tank-style language education technology competition sponsored by The Language Flagship Technology Innovation Center at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. A group of judges, including Language Magazine editor Daniel Ward, selected FabuLingua as the 2021 LaunchPad winner. FabuLingua helps kids learn languages through...

Since its adoption of the Official Languages Act in 1969, Canada has been an officially bilingual country—that is, the nation has recognized both English and French as its official languages on a federal level. But French has been in decline, as its proportion of native speakers within the country shrinks. A series of major reforms to the country’s language...

For the first time since its inception, all 50 states and the District of Columbia are or have begun working toward implementing a state Seal of Biliteracy program, according to the recently released 2020 National Seal of Biliteracy Report for the 2018-19 Academic Year. The program, which began in 2008 as a grassroots movement in California aims to recognize...

A new study suggests that the language a bilingual person speaks may affect their physical sensations, including pain. Researchers at the University of Miami tried to discover if the ways we express feelings, such as pain, love, or joy, in various languages resulted in differences in the sensations themselves. They asked, “Would a painful event like a stubbed toe or...

Dual-language bilingual education (DLBE) programs, at the core, are about serving students who have been linguistically and culturally marginalized in U.S. schools (Izquierdo and Medina, in press). However, it is also important to understand that as DLBE has increased in popularity, the ideas of equity and social justice as focal points have been lost in translation for some who...

https://youtu.be/VPDgJdDUBV0 As Raul Herrera, says, "I'm finally learning to speak Spanish just for this..."

Bilingual children and adolescents may grow up with more grey matter, according to a new study published in Brain Structure and Function, in which an international team of academics led by the UK’s University of Reading and the U.S. Georgetown University examined detailed scans of children’s and adolescents’ brains and found that bilingual participants had potential advantages of both...